Archives for October 2010

Today marks the last day of October, and Halloween if you’re into that sort of stuff. I’m not and my son would like to be. This is how he came home from after school care the other day – my very own ghoul.

We’ve had a lovely weekend so far. I went out on Friday night with some friends to see another friend do her debut gig in a new band. They were great fun and I had great fun. I don’t go out often enough any more to see live music and I love it when I do.

My girlfriend stayed over and I cooked us bacon and eggs for breakfast on Saturday morning and she hung around to have a chat with me before leaving.

I spent some time cooking sausage rolls, washing dishes, washing towels and then sat down to watch the new Karate Kid movie with JJ – something he’s been wanting to do since it was on at the cinema. Halfway during the movie I stopped it to make dinner and scrape some wood together to light the fire. I know, it’s nearly summer here and I shouldn’t need to make heat inside the house at this time of year.

I slept in this morning, we did some farmer’s market shopping, I’ve done more washing and I’ve brushed some of Monty’s winter coat off so hopefully there’s less left lying around the house.

And I’ve got a chook ready to roast before I pick up The Surfer from his golf trip. He’ll probably be quite tired and quite over all that testosterone.

I’ll probably turn off the doorbell incase of stray trick and treaters – I know, not very Halloweeny of me but we just don’t do it here.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I got a life coaching session from a dreams and life coach. I also mentioned how I could have had a dream analysis but I didn’t do that because I don’t really remember the dreams I’ve been having. Well wouldn’t you know it? I’ve been a prolific dreamer since then and some of them I am remembering.

One I had the other night has stuck with me. The memory of it, or the retelling of it is kinda vague because dreams rarely make sense but it sort of goes like this.

I was in a place, don’t know what kind of place but it had a staircase going upwards. There was also a man there who was going to escort me up the stairs. I can’t remember if JJ was with me but his presence was really felt because the man had done something really really nice for JJ. You see, JJ has expressed an interest to me that he’d like to learn the trombone and/or the trumpet (God help me) and this man had interspersed along the staircase these musical instruments. I can’t remember if he was going to teach him how to play, or give him the instruments or what but it’s not so much about that. It was the overwhelming feeling of someone doing something just for JJ, and something really lovely and thoughtful, that made me feel really happy but really emotional at the same time. In fact when I woke up during the dream I started crying because I felt so emotional about it.

Now to rewind to the night before. JJ, myself, The Surfer and his two children had been to the swimming pool so the three kids could swim some laps because we’re thinking of joining the local surf life saving club and the kids have to show that they can swim before they’re allowed to do certain exercises in the sea water.

That was all fine, but by the time we finished the kids were a bit tired and hungry. JJ has an awful habit of having the last word and answering back and he seems to do it more when The Surfer is around. Anyway, we stopped to get some pizza on the way home and after we’d bought it the kids were going on and on and we asked them to stop. JJ just kept on going and wouldn’t stop – mind you one of the other kids kept asking him to stop and it became a vicious circle where neither of them was going to give up. I asked them both to stop and they both continued the whole, fairly short, way home.

During dinner JJ did something again where he had to have the last word and The Surfer had enough and sent him to another room. After a while he got him back, I got JJ to apologise and we ate in silence after that. We stayed over at The Surfer’s place and it was the next morning where I had the dream.

That evening The Surfer was at my place and we had a big discussion about JJ and about how much The Surfer should or shouldn’t be involved in disciplining and so on. I’m happy for him to step in and I’ve never felt what he says and does is unwarranted. I have thought more about the incident since and realised that JJ feels he has to compete for my attention when The Surfer is around me. This is understandable because it’s just been me and JJ for his whole life so it’s a huge change for him and one that he’s taking some time to adjust to. I also tried to explain that JJ is taking longer to learn social skills and social cues than a lot of other kids and that he just doesn’t get it sometimes.

Unfortunately The Surfer usually sees the naughty side of JJ and not his sweet side so we’ll have to work through that one and after having a chat to a friend about it today maybe they just need to spend some one-on-one time to get to know each other a bit better and I also need to somehow involve JJ more when he’s around I think.

The next morning as said goodbye to The Surfer as he went away for a few days on a golfing trip, he gave me a kiss and a hug and walked over to JJ and gave him a hug too. I don’t think he’s ever given him a hug before so he’s obviously committed to trying to work at a relationship with JJ. I really hope so.

Nearly one whole month ago we went away for the long weekend camping. It’s pretty luxurious sleeping in a bed in a camper trailer with a fairly dark canvas even though we had to set it up in the dark.

Fortunately once we got the trailer setup we were able to sit down and relax with a few drinks. Because we’d arrived late though, most people had done their drinking and were pretty much ready for bed except for one friend who didn’t want to miss out on anything and we tried escorting her to her tent a few times before I practically pushed her in there and told her to go to bed.

The next morning we had a leisurely breakfast and then got in the car to go and find some surf. We did find some surf indeed and some other creatures besides humans enjoyed it along with us.

I know I showed this photo in a previous post but it’s SO worth showing again.

Here’s some more that you didn’t see.

If the water hadn’t been so cold I would have loved to swim out to them but I was only able to go in, dive under a wave and get back out.

After a morning at the beach we came back to the campsite and put our chairs near the shoreline to sit and watch the scenery and practise the ukuleles. We ended up being the campfire entertainment for the two evenings we were there. I must practise our repertoire a bit more so I don’t have to get someone to hold up the sheet music and shine a light on it. But we were appreciated and I had a heap of fun doing it.

While we were practising near the beach a pelican swam closer and closer to us and got out the water and walked up the beach a little bit toward us. I said to The Surfer that he must have heard us playing and wanted to investigate. I’m sure that’s the reason why!

The great thing about camping in cooler weather is being able to have a campfire. In fact because there were so many of us we had two campfires amongst us. My son acquainted himself with the people sitting around the other campfire and even had some dessert they cooked using their camp ovens. Even though these people were part of our group, I didn’t know them but they didn’t seem to mind that he adopted them. I did talk to a couple of them the next day to thank them for feeding my son.

I even managed to get a couple of obligatory sunset photos.

On Sunday night we went to bed and not long after I had to make a dash for the toilet and for the rest of the night I had horrible stomach cramps. On the Monday I felt like I had a really really bad hangover, even though it wasn’t a hangover. Because I felt so woeful The Surfer had to pack up the camp pretty much by himself. I thought I might have had food poisoning but I think it was a virus. Unfortunately it wasn’t a 24 hour virus and it turned into bronchitis so I ended up being sick for two weeks. At least it didn’t happen until we were about to leave and up until I got sick I had a really good time.

Usually he has his breakfast at the kitchen table while I have a shower. We have our routine finely tuned on a work/school morning. He sits in the same chair for each meal and the he quite often doesn’t bother turning the light on in the room, preferring to eat in semi-darkness.

I think this is the one thing every day where I don’t have to tell him to do a certain thing, ie eat. And I’ve learned that he MUST eat before we go for our morning walk which is why I have a shower when he’s eating his breakfast. He kind of reminds me of a centaur in ‘The Silver Chair’ one of the Narnia books. The centaur would take hours to eat his breakfast because he had a human stomach and a horse stomach. JJ isn’t quite that bad but when you’re eating at least two bowls of cereal it can equate to a bit of time.

As he has a couple of bowls of cereal with milk, there’s usually milk spilled on the table. The cushion on his chair is a reminder that he uses this chair regularly to eat and because he drops things on it and makes the cushion dirty. It’s a pain in the ass to wash them because you can’t take the covers off so I have to wait for a hot day to wash them then hang them on the line to dry.

I wrote the above as part of an exercise I’ve been given by a life coach in an attempt to unblock my creative juices as they haven’t been flowing much lately.

Usually when I’m contacted for a review it’s about a product that I can hold in my hands but this time it was for a dream interpretation or life coaching. About a year ago I started looking on the internet for a life coach but couldn’t work my way through all the information and gave up so it’s kind of nice that this opportunity fell into my lap.

A lot’s happened since then with being in a relationship and starting a new job. My old job was one of the reasons I’d wanted life coaching in the first place and as I’d moved on with the job front life coaching had taken a back seat. But, I thought, there’s nothing to lose and always something to gain.

I had nearly an hour’s conversation with Jane Teresa Anderson from Dream Sight. We could have Skyped but I haven’t set mine up yet so we talked on the phone for nearly an hour. Life coaching sessions go for about 45 minutes and dream readings for an hour. I’m going to share what we talked about.

Jane Teresa first asked me to tell her a bit about myself. I shared my age and that I had a birthday yesterday, I’ve got a nine year old son who I’ve raised by myself, I’ve been in a relationship for about nine months now and that I started a new job a couple of months ago. I ended with the statement that I’m pretty happy and as I said it I knew she’d dig deeper into that one, and she did.

She asked me if there’s anything in my life that I’m unhappy about. I couldn’t think of anything there and then but as we kept talking about what I like to do and what my day-to-day routine is like I realised that there is something I am a bit unhappy about.

For the last few months I feel like my creativity has been sucked out of me a bit. That is reflected in the fact that I don’t blog anywhere near as much as I used to but it’s also related to the fact that I don’t have as much time as I used to. I don’t begrudge The Surfer for the time he takes up, or my son, or my job, but by the time I make time for these things there’s not a lot of time left.

I enjoy writing which is why I keep this blog but I’ve been stuck for what to write here for some time now. The rest of the hour went really quickly and apart from a couple of times where I didn’t know how to answer a question it was really easy to talk to Jane Teresa – I felt like I’d met her before.

So, how does one get the creative juices flowing? This is what I’ve started doing at Jane Teresa’s suggestion:

I bought a little notebook and every night before I go to work (so four nights a week) I’m to get three books out of my bookshelf. I love that she assumed that I have a bookshelf because I’m sure that not everyone has.

From each book I’m to open up to any page, wave my finger around and point to the page. I’m then to pick a noun and write the noun down in my notebook. I could choose an adjective but a noun is preferable.

I do this with the other two books so I’ve got three nouns to work with.

On the way to work on the tram I’m to look at the three words and think and daydream around those three words.

When I get to work I spend five minutes ‘downloading’ the daydream. It might be one sentence or it might be the beginning of a story or article idea (with an idea of how it might go).

It could be a dialogue.

It could just be complete rubbish but it’s a stream of consciousness that should help unblock my creativity.

I’m to do this for four weeks.

I could also do this type of exercise with JJ as a talking thing rather than a writing thing.

It could also be useful for work if I’m stuck. I’d pick three words around the project and build on that.

Last night I picked my three words – milk, chair, room and I ended up writing something that will become a blog post.

Already today I had lots of ideas for what I could do with my blog and some more enthusiasm for perhaps doing them.

One thing I commented to Jane Teresa was, ‘You always make time for things you enjoy don’t you?’ This is probably why I’ve done everything lately but my tax return and I think I’ve got just under two weeks to get it done.

Today is my birthday – well it’s tonight now. I’ve spent the day at work where I was quite spoiled. A colleague baked a delicious cake, everyone sang me happy birthday and gave me a lovely present – a ring. I’d worn a ring to work that a girlfriend gave me last year and just after I got to work I noticed the ‘stone’ on the top had come off. It was obviously a cheap ring. The ‘silver’ had pretty much worn off too so I wasn’t too devastated. My new ring should last quite a bit longer.

The Surfer spent the night last night so he gave me my birthday present this morning as he’s off on a school camp with his daughter tonight. He remembered about my stationery fetish so brought some stationery from Smiggles for me plus a ticket for a festival early next year.

My phone has been buzzing all day with text messages and phone calls and my Facebook wall is covered with birthday wishes. So even though I’m now 44 years old I don’t really care because I do love the birthday celebration.

My sister even organised some flowers and a card from my son so that was rather special – bless her.

The photo at the top was one I took on our recent long weekend trip away to Yorke Peninsula. The Surfer was out near where these dolphins were and JJ was splashing about in the water closer to shore. I had to yell out to him to have a look at the dolphins before I madly took some photos. It was a very special early birthday present, especially as they came back the next day. I wish the water had been warmer and I would have considered swimming out, although there was a rip so it might not have been a good thing to do.

I’m about to go and watch an episode of The Amazing Race and then it will be an early night for me. I couldn’t get to sleep last night then I dreamt about christmas trees this morning – enough to frighten the life out of me.

It started with a tummy viral bug and it lingered all last week. During the week I kept going to work (except for one day off) and doing what I have to do. On the weekend I helped run a surprise 50th birthday party and do all my domestic goddess goodness on the Sunday.

Yesterday I came home from work with a migraine I just couldn’t shake nearly all day.

This morning I went to the doctor and he told me I’ve got bronchitis and gave me some antibiotics (well he prescribed them). I’m having another day of rest and hoping the antibiotics will start to do their work and I’ll start to feel a bit normal.

Because it’s my birthday in two days and I’m supposed to be having people around on Saturday night. We’ll see.